How do I disable pinging of my network address?

[slacker_x]

When I ping 192.168.0.255, I get replies from all computers on my network. I guess this doesn't really matter because the computers are in the private IP range, but I would still like to know how to disable this.

Isn't it something similar to the way you enable ip forwarding?

thanks

[optech]

i don't really see a need to disable pings.
unless you're running a large-scale server and wish to prevent certain types of DoS attacks.
i'm not even sure how you'd disable pings, as it's not a feature most computers should be without. =)

[slacker_x]

I'm not talking about disabling the pinging of individual computers, I'm talking about disabling the pinging of the broadcast address 192.168.0.255

right now that causes every compuer on my network to reply to the ping request. I think that is generally considered to be a bad thing

[fracture]

I was just reading about this today actually in The Advanced Routing HOW-TO at LDP (http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Adv-Routing-HOWTO-12.html#ss12.2)... the "like packet forwarding" rang a bell...

The proc file in this case is
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts
and setting it to 1 will ignore the broadcast pings.

[slacker_x]

Like I said before, my network is using the private IP range, so I guess this doesn't matter. I guess most firewalls that are infront of networks with public IP addresses just filter out icmp echo packets going to the .255 address

Thanks for the help though

[nathaniel]

if it interests u further, I would be more worried with ppl who from inside the network start using the packet size option. In BSD you can block them from doing that without prventing them from pinging something "politly".

NB

[slacker_x]

so you are saying:

limit the size of the icmp packets generated on the internal network

is that correct?